Power electronic solutions for objects are increasingly in demand, for example, which formerly, when at all, were achieved with mechanical or electromechanical means. The ever-increasing labor and material costs as well as volume and weight of the electronic assemblies pose the main obstacle for innovative solutions. The tasks making for the most costs are usually manually mounting the power semiconductors and their assembly on cooling devices for evacuating the heat dissipated. The reliability of an assembly is currently dictated practically solely by the quality of these manual working procedures, the quality assurance needed for this purpose adding to the costs involved, however.
Producing, testing, operating and maintenance of such electronic assemblies must be successful on an international scale. For this purpose, material and production must be minimized, but also repairs, modifications and lastly an environmentally compatible disposal must be guaranteed. Fabrication needs to be significantly more reliable to reduce the costs of testing.
Furthermore, it is of advantage when same or similar modules can be made use of in high-priced and cheap products.
A totally new challenge has materialized in the construction of machine tools where the electronics cabinets are now required to be replaced by modules which then need to be installed directly. Since machine tools react to dissipated heat by expanding and distorting, conventional air cooling of the modules is no longer acceptable, at least for high-precision machines.
In the case of electrical discharge machining (EDM) the situation is particularly complicated since these systems also include installing generator modules with dissipated heat in the kilowatt range.